Charles R. Anderson

Kori, What? There is something more worthwhile than sex? Are you serious? Have you joined the female conspiracy? You seemed to be on the right track when you started this thread.

I highly recommend Patrick Michael's book Meltdown. He does a very convincing job of showing how poor the science of the catastrophic global warming doom is. In case after case of research and reporting he shows how a focus on a portion of the record distorts the view given. He shows case after case in which other factors than CO2 or other greenhouse gas emissions caused or were major contributors to the effect claimed. And then there is the question of how bad it would be to have modest global warming. He points at the effect of wind on the Arctic ice thickness and notes that slight increases in the winter temperature (greenhouse gases most increase the temperature in cold and dry areas) do not cause the ice to melt. He points out that the ice thickness in most of Antarctica is increasing, though the melting ice on one peninsula is given all the media attention. He discusses the real meaning of many studies on the distribution and numbers of plants and animals. He talks about the effects of variations in radiation from the sun and about the effects of ocean currents. He explains that claims that some areas will both become much more wet and much hotter do not make sense due to the cooling effects of evaporating water. The book is fascinating. You will learn a lot about weather and climate, plants and animals, and the earth.

Chris, I do remember talk about Gov. George W. Romney's being Mormon. It does not seem to have been of great importance initially at least, since he was early-on the favorite to win the nomination of the Republicans for President in preparation for the 1968 election. In the end, he only received the votes of electors from Michigan and Utah, so his Mormanism at least may have helped him in Utah. What really swung things against him was a comment he made that he had been brainwashed about the need for the Vietnam War.

There is no Objectivist science. In so far as science describes reality and makes predictions of behavior for reality, anyone desirous of knowing reality will embrace it. Of course, science is not yet, and may never be a complete description of reality, so the Objectivist can declare it wanting in that way. But, Peikoff's ideas are irrational and ignorant. Generally, scientists follow quite rational approaches to trying to understand reality. When they head down the wrong path for a while, they generally figure out that it is the wrong path and make corrections. It would be great if politicians and artists, for instance, were as self-correcting. One can really question Peikoff's wisdom in trying to address problems in science, when he seems to have so little aptitude for it and when other fields might benefit more from the attention of a philosopher. Although, given his present irrationality on many issues, I doubt that many fields would benefit from his attention.

For the record, I have just skimmed through this thread, but read each and every one of Dragonfly's comments. For those of you who might think that I always disagree with him, I found his comments very knowledgeable and astute in this thread. I greatly enjoyed the experience.

Tracinski in his 22 Feb TIA Daily pointed out a very well-written column by Pete Du Pont in the Wall Street Journal OpinionJournal giving a summary of the historical perspective on global warming and on contributors other than man with his CO2 production. Go here.

Some results of searching BusinessWeek.com were: Venezuela taking over oil companies By Ian James Caracas, Venezuela The Associated Press 1 Feb 07 Chavez "said that 3,000 Venezuelan employees in the Sincor project -- jointly owned by France's Total, Norway's Statoil and PDVSA -- would become PDVSA employees." "I'm sure that they're going to accept this because we are going to continue being partners. Now, if they aren't in agreement, they are totally free to leave." "What we want is to negotiate," he said. "We hope these companies cooperate." Just the kind of "negotiation" we would all feel comfortable with, right? PDVSA is the Venezuelan state oil company. Chavez has been given power by congress to issue laws by decree in energy and other areas. He says he will nationalize four Orinoco heavy oil projects by 1 May. PDVSA will take at least 60% of the projects over. In Top News, 31 Jan 07 Venezuela's Chavez Wins Lawmaking Powers by Peter Wilson "We want to install a dictatorship of real democracy," Venezuelan Vice-President Jorge Rodriguez said. The Associated Press 16 Feb 07 US Imports from Venezuela at 12-year low While Venezuela was our 4th largest supplier of oil in 2006, our Venezuelan oil imports were down by 8.2% from 2005, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

SaulOhio, My comments were something of an amalgam of what I have read in The Economist, Forbes, BusinessWeek, and The Washington Times. However, the greatest content was what I remembered from two articles in the 10 August 2006 Economist: Special Report: National Oil Companies Oil's Dark Secret Most of the world's oil reserves are in the hands of state-run companies, many of which are run badly. and Leaders: National Oil Companies Really Big Oil Sluggish behemouths control virtually all of the world's oil; they should be privatised There may have been something from the 9 Nov 2006 issue of the Economist in: The Americas: Venezuela The Man from Maracaibo Since my subscription to The Economist ran out in December, I can only search the titles of articles on-line at their site at the moment. Without subscriptions, one can search BusinessWeek.com and Forbes.com and find a number of interesting articles on Venezuela, oil, nationalization of the power industry, TV, and telephone industries, restrictions on reporters, and much else.

For the record, there was nothing convenient for me in the loss of the July thread. I have acted on the assumption that Dragonfly is simply mistaken in his belief that he has the entire record of his contributions to that thread, rather than concluding that he has lied about it.

We are not going to achieve anything with this discussion. We see things in much too different ways. The number of operations performed in the brain is huge, so one operation out of half a billion does not imply an interval of once in a blue moon. Whether volitional acts occur somewhat more frequently, I do not know. Have a good day, if you wish.

Ellen, With so little known about how the brain functions, scientific knowledge today only covers a small portion of the ground that would be needed to support the conclusion that the brain is entirely a classical physics and deterministic system. If one operation in one billion is not, then room might be established for a true act of volition. Of course, the vast majority of brain operations will be deterministic, but Dragonfly made two assertions in our July discussions that the brain was deterministic where he meant in the context of our discussion that all actions of the brain were deterministic. How do random notions or associations popping up lead to volition or to some capability to focus or not? I do not know. Maybe they don't. But, I do know that it is unlikely given the scale of some components of the brain that quantum effects will not occur and it is perhaps possible that this is important. To proclaim that science now says they do not is wrong. If a particular paper has made that claim in as broad a context as Dragonfly has implied, then the referees were very lax. Of course, as more is learned about the physics of the brain, we may come to a better understanding of whether we really might be volitional as most people perceive themselves to be or that we are deceived and simply complex classical physics programs as Dragonfly asserts. If the latter, there is yet a long way to go before that conclusion is scientifically justified. In the meantime my introspective knowledge of volitional acts is too strong to ignore in favor of some studies of a very few aspects of brain mechanisms, which have proven, as one would expect, to be of a deterministic nature.

Being a volitional agent has always been highly valued by men. The idea that we are volitional has often been used as one of the important distinctions between man and the other animals. At the root of our pride in being productive and moral men, is the idea that we have worked and chosen over and over again to make ourselves the kind of man we are. Now, if the evidence actually exists that man is a determined system whose mind simply responds to external triggers and he cannot really initiate a choice such as to focus his mind on a problem or sensation or not, then, yes, we must accept that this is the case. But why, in the face of one's having clear knowledge of initiating mental actions, one would choose to assume that the mind is totally determined without such conclusive evidence, I cannot imagine a healthy reason. It also remains immensely presumptuous for one man to assert certainty that another man's mind is deterministic and cannot initiate mental action. There are many ideas about the brain that need badly to be discussed, but they need not be done with such arrogant presumption as you are inclined to. I certainly found a way to satisfy the condition that sends your program into an anger loop here. When someone else thinks in very different ways than I do, it can take a while to figure out how and if it is worthwhile to try to discuss ideas with them. It is particularly tough to interact with a complex program I have found. A lie? Well, unfortunately I was on vacation at the time and using a borrowed laptop, so I do not have the discussion. I just have a clear recall of how hard I had to work to get you to move beyond all sorts of wild assertions that many of the things I said were wrong while you were unwilling to state what you thought was right. The reference you gave to the scientific literature was a Physical Review article which can not possibly have yet provided the necessary evidence that all brain functions are deterministic and adequately described by classical physics. Our knowledge of the brain is not anywhere near adequate to making that assertion at this time. I accept that some mechanisms of the brain have been studied and that they must almost always or maybe even always function in a deterministic way. As I said in the discussion then, of course most of the brain's functions must be deterministic. When we set the mind to the task of adding 2 to 2 we really want the result to always be 4. This is true of almost all of our brain's functions. The question is whether it is true of every action that occurs in the brain that may focus upon an action or not. In fact, there are structures in the brain small enough that quantum effects may be important within them. Now, I do not maintain that there is an actual clear path from quantum effects to volition. Maybe there is not. But, your assertion that all brain activity is deterministic and described adequately by classical physics is not now supportable. The first time that you flat out claimed that the mind was a deterministic, classical physics system after a few previous statements that hedged your bets, was a landmark in our discussions from my viewpoint. I remember it clearly and it was repeated later. Your argument does not make sense to me. It simply does not succeed. Unless, the key word here is in essence. Of course, the brain must be mostly a deterministic system as I have noted above and back in July 2006 in the lost thread, but the question is whether it is completely and only deterministic. I doubt that it is, but we have have probably a good couple of hundred years of research to do before we will fully understand brain operations, optimistically estimated! Of course, quantum mechanical operations may be documented much sooner. If "our brain" means all human beings, then it is a function shared by all of us. But, at this time only some activities and functions of some brains have been examined and we clearly do not understand how brains work very well. Because humans differ substantially in genetic make-up and their biochemistry, it is reasonable to expect variations in how brains function. We do know that some brains have IQs of 60 and some of 160, so there are some differences. We know that the densities of certain structures in brains differ. We know that some people are more creative and some other are better at rapidly and accurately carrying out simple tasks. Again brains differ. The degree to which brains may exercise volition may differ. Possibly some brains do not have the necessary chemical to turn on the mechanism that provides volitional control. At this time, we do not know. I do not know and you do not know. I do not know Fred Weiss well, so I have no comment on him. Condescending sarcasm? Well, what can I do in the face of your assertion that you are a complex program which is completely determined and classical? I cannot say I know your mind better than you do. I do not. If you are not aware of volitional acts of your own, as I am in my case, then I must accept the difference between us. Heck, I thought you were secure in thinking that you were the superior life form. No, this is not sarcasm. It is a reluctant acknowledgment that our minds must be very different.

Judith, I suppose we have a bit of a problem here, since Dagny is Rand's character and we can only go by her presentation of Dagny. Dagny is presented as a very capable telegrapher, as a pilot, as having some knowledge of bridge design, and generally as very capable of jury-rigged solutions to the increasing breakdowns on the railroad. These things suggest that she was very competent mechanically and with her hands. Perhaps they are not definitive, however. But, one always gets the sense that Dagny can do whatever she sets out to do, which I believe is a message that Rand was trying to convey. Then, since I love Dagny, I may simply be prejudiced in her favor!

Cyrano was great, but terribly frustrating as well. One wants such a hero to achieve happiness and yet he will not declare his love for Roxanne. He really needed to get over his nose and give her the chance to see if she could love him. Actually, I think she did love him. His willingness to allow life to a dishonesty was their mutual downfall.

Dragonfly, Apparently it is socially graceful to tell others that they are a program lacking volition. It is fine to say to me that you know my mind better than I do and that my belief that I am volitional is a delusion. I view this as incredibly presumptuous, just as it would be presumptuous of me to claim that I know your mind better than you do. So, I grant that you know your mind better than I do and therefore that you are a complex program lacking volition as you insist. However, I retain my conviction that I am volitional. This viewpoint is one that your program calls snide. As for rational discussion, we had a long and drawn out discussion in July 2006 during which you made many assertions without any backing and quite a few snide remarks. One assertion was that you knew so much about the human brain, both yours and mine and everyone else's, that we were all complex programs lacking volition. You also maintained that all functions of the brain were described adequately by classical physics, which is a hugely unfounded assertion given how little we know as yet about the operations of the brain. I found your approach, which fails to distinguish what is known from what is not, to be irrational. I see no reason in light of your arguments for believing that my volitional acts are delusions. Apparently, we are different life forms. But whatever kind of life form you are, now that it is established that your program triggers feelings of hurt when you are distinguished from volitional human beings, I will try to be kind. I always did think it disgusting when boys pulled the wings off of dragonflies. Other life forms should be given a measure of respect.

Victor -- I was impressed by how well you took Michael's constructive advice on comparisons to most people. Angie -- I always was drawn to spirited women and most of them were tomboys, so I was not surprised to hear that you were a tomboy! But, while playing tackle football without pads is the right way to play football, I have to admit that I prefer playing on grass or dirt to playing on concrete or asphalt. You must really have been a fireball! Hmmm... actually, you still are!

Of course specialization is good. So is integration and application.

There are a great many rational reasons for having a deeply benevolent view of other humans and even of other living creatures. I am sure that some of the resonance that being nice to others and feeling good when they are nice to us is also built into us by evolution, or at least into many of us. In addition, there are many ways in which benevolence provides us with many more avenues for arranging the trade of values, whether they be in the form of ideas, goods, services, or good will. Enhancing the appreciation of these objective truths has long been important to me as an Objectivist and is the subject of a number of my articles and many of my posts. I applaud your new (Dec 05) appreciation of being nice, Michael. Reality is primary and man's needs to live a full, rich, and creative life are many. We, as Objectivists, are required to appreciate the complexity and the richness of living our lives both with respect to the non-living and the living aspects of our reality.

I am definitely not a cosmologist. That does not mean that I am not a materials physicist. Of course, some scientists are highly specialized, especially those in academia. Others are more problem-solving oriented generalists who learn whatever they must to solve the kind of problems they are interested in. I function pretty much the same way whether I am doing materials physics, chemistry, or materials science and engineering or various combinations of all three. Of course, since my interest is in applications of materials, there will be some physicists who will claim I am simply a technologist. Fine, but I think that is simply an effort to pat themselves on the back as a kind of aristocracy when they are usually working in fields that have yet to prove of sufficient usefulness that mankind is willing to invest much in those fields. This is not to say that I do not find these fields interesting or that I object to the money that does go into them. It only means that the idea of certain physicists looking down their noses at people using physics to perform applied physics, or simply in areas different than their own, is offensive. One of the greatest problems in physics, or science if you must, is the terrible tendency to compartmentalize it. We have far too few cross-disciplinary physicists. We lack the integrators who are needed. When we have had people who specialized in one area move into another area, we have often seen great contributions made in the new area. Watson and Crick in biology are one good example. Logically odd that Dragonfly, who thinks that all brain functions are the result of classical physics, should object to the idea that biology is a field of physics. Nonetheless, I was quite sure he would react as he did.

Isn't it supremely ironic that the best argument for the existence of a benevolent god cannot be used by either the Christians or the Muslims because they so detest the joys of sex!

It is an interesting article. In fact, most people who read Ayn Rand's novels do read them as superficially as the writer of this article did and they commonly do react pretty much the way she did to the novels and Ayn Rand as a result. Because Rand writes such a good story, many people read her novels with as much thought as they put into reading a romance novel. I tend to read almost everything I read slowly and with frequent stops to think about what I have read and to evaluate it in terms of everything else I know. But few people read this way. In fact, I often had to put the brakes on myself in a way I would not normally have to do when reading Ayn Rand's novels. There was an awful lot to think about, but the story was a natural page-burner so it was hard to stop and think as much as I usually would. I know people who stayed up for 48 hours straight and read through all of Atlas Shrugged. Well, you cannot possibly give it the thought it needs in 48 hours. So, yes, many people read it as simply having an affinity for their feelings as teenagers that adults do not know what they are talking about. Rand novels feed that sense of rebellion and desire for independence. That they have enduring and critical ideas is lost on most readers. It is also common to assume that Ayn Rand's ideas must lead to some of the confusion that she had in living life. This is akin to assuming that a scientist who believes in god will never do any good science. It is, of course, much easier put down a love and respect for the hero as creator and independent thinker by pointing out that Frank O'Connor was not the equivalent of Howard Roark or John Galt, than it is to address the contributions that heroes have and do make to civilization. This writer makes many of these intellectual shortcuts, but they are telling shortcuts for most people, even most of those who have read Rand's novels.

Venezuela has decreasing oil production since the crude oil there is apparently difficult to extract and has a high sulfur content, which makes it hard to refine. In the past, the oil production company was unusually well-run as nationalized oil companies go and had lots of American help. Now, the oil company is filled with Chavez feather-bedders and the skilled workers who could keep the difficult operation running have been leaving. As a result, many mistakes in operating the fields are being made and production is way down. Recently, Citgo, owned by Venezuela, has been losing money. Given the demand for oil, this is not an easy thing to do. Because of Chavez's policies, the capital investment that oil production and refineries need to handle the Venezuelan crude is not ongoing at the necessary rate, so this too will cause them to be less competitive on the world market. Chavez's day are numbered if Venezuelans are less helpless than the Cubans have been. The wealth of many oil-producing countries was increasing at substantial rates until most of these countries, Canada and the US excepted, nationalized the oil industry. The result, long-term, was stagnation in the income made from their oil assets as oil production proceeded with less and less competence. The wealth of most such oil-producing countries then stagnated over the long term. In many cases, they have been losing ground with respect to most of the rest of the world. One place aware of the problems they face is Iran, where their effort to develop a nuclear weapon is being carried out in a race against their decreasing oil production and income in the context of a long mismanaged economy. So, yes, oil money does provide Chavez and radical Islamists with the money to create mischief, but they are all on a downward trend. Perhaps in the Middle East, that further cuts off economic opportunities for the people and leaves them frustrated and under-employed. This contributes to some of the problems and the leaders try desperately to direct their frustrations at the US and Israel so the people will not understand that their own leaders are the main source of their problems. Chavez uses the US as the source of all of Venezuela's problems in much the same way.

To Kill a Mockingbird is a very good novel. I read it decades ago and once again when one of my daughters read it in school. The Montgomery County schools are run with the teachers (particularly as union members) as the first priority. I presented a clear case of Katie's best interest to a principal with a request that she be allowed to transfer to another history class on the same topic at the same time and with fewer students and the principal would not allow it for fear that the old teacher's feelings would be hurt. She gave so much busy-work homework in the Honors World History course that Katie did not have time for her other three Honors classes in math, physics, and English. I made no accusations against the teacher. I simply argued that Katie needed a balanced education and that these other fields were also important to her. The Principal never gave an inch of ground. There was absolutely no way she would risk hurting the feelings of the history teacher! Some of the teachers are total crackpots and nearly all are socialists, the sky-is-falling environmentalists, and child designers who only want to exclude the parents from the lives of their children and leave all instruction to the teachers. The teachers generally view parents as all being rednecks who are corrupting their children with old-fashioned ideas. The teachers are crusaders to see to it that the children learn the holy word, that of equality, diversity, victimhood, racial consciousness, cultural equality, provided it is not Anglo-Saxon or Western European culture, anti-business, class warfare, anti-human environmentalism, and hatred of the oppressing white male and the military. But, other than these minor problems, they offer a fairly wide range of courses, including AP courses. I guess that accounts for the reputation as a good school system.

I do not know the difference between a physicist and an engineer. Sure, commonly they majored in different departments at a university. Because physics is a huge subject, it makes sense to divide it up into many subfields for the purpose of teaching specialties and putting people with similar interests into the same department. So, the Physics Department emphases cosmology, high energy physics, low-temperature condensed matter physics, and maybe still has people working with photonics and semiconductor physics. This department ignores the physics of chemistry, the physics of living organisms, some aspects of electrical materials physics, the physics of stress and strain and their effects in materials, and the physics of biomaterials perhaps (or perhaps not). These ignored areas of physics are areas of such significance to man in living life and controlling his environment that they are worthy of having their own departments which collect together those investigators, teachers, and students interested in these subfields of physics. Sure, some subfields were not all that obviously fields of physics when man first started studying them. It would be reasonable when biology was simply a classification science to believe it was something quite different than a subfield of physics. When chemistry was essentially alchemy, one could believe it to be another kind of subject altogether also. But now, it is clear that each of these fields is a science dominated by the laws of physics. They cannot be held to be different than physics. So, what is the difference between applied physics and engineering? I know of no significant difference. Even in academia, people in the physics department and people in the school of engineering are often doing very similar research. Well, of course, because it is all about physics. But the products of each academic department hold faith with their clique and fight to maintain the fiction that there is something fundamentally different in their field than in the others. They hold each other at arms length and they are proud of their ignorance all those areas of physics about which their department did not teach them. I cannot be master of all of physics, but I can love it all and be aware of its very varied consequences and the importance of those consequences to man in living on earth.

References were made above to an Objectivist physics when referring to the criticisms of Peikoff and Harriman of much of modern physics. Since Ayn Rand had little to say about physics and seemed to be quite conscious of her lack of knowledge of science, she did not develop an Objectivist theory of physics. Since Peikoff, and I assume Harriman, hold that Objectivism is a closed system, they cannot claim that they have developed the Objectivist physics. Furthermore, since their objections to modern physics are so poorly stated, one should not grace their set of purely negative comments with the name Objectivist physics. Presumably, if an Objectivist physics exists it will be one which is consistent with reality and an aid to understanding reality. For now, given the context of man's knowledge of physics, the Objectivist physics is pretty much the physics of our day.